Tag: Farooq Abdullah

Margund (North Kashmir), April 28: The surest sign that the Kashmir campaign is part of a mainstream election is that Narendra Modi has come to drop in the thick of it.

The surest sign that the mainstream here is differently defined is that three-fourths of Kashmiris aren’t bothered voting.

Panchayat elections have drawn upwards of 80 percent voters in parts of the Valley. Assembly turnouts this last decade and a half have seen an average 45 percent turnout. Electoral engagement in Kashmir comes tethered to compulsions of quotidian utility, local means and ends; it’s no benchmark of political endorsement. If it is, the interpreters of the Kashmiri morse in New Delhi and beyond should spell out the message of 25-odd percent, no more, coming forth to vote for Parliament.

But between those insistent truisms has sprung a teaser that captivates voter and boycotter alike: Is Modi coming? Is it going to be iss baar Modi sarkar? More Kashmiris are interested in how India is voting than Kashmir itself. Is Modi really coming? What will that do?

At the Abdullahs’ election rally in Margund in North Kashmir

Is this election Kashmir’s renewed interrogation of the idea of India? Having spurned the poll themselves, are they reading in the 2014 ballot-leaves clues to the prospect of a re-negotiation? What could Modi do? For better or for worse, but surely something new, something beyond remaining knocked as the “arch-stone” in the edifice of secular India? “He’s not a man to hang around,” a retired civil servant with stated separatist aspiration told me of Modi over tea last evening, “He speaks a new language many may not like, but it is a new language. He may have new terms of reference to spell out to Kashmiris.”